Category Archives: papers

Educational research is, of course, one of the most epistemically diverse and challenging research fields. Actionable knowledge and epistemic fluency are big themes in it. Some people have been asking us if we wrote anything about this. Not recently, but below there are summaries and links to some our earlier papers that should give an insight into our ways of thinking about epistemological landscape of educational research. They are written during 2010–2011, but the main messages are still very relevant. The first paper discusses connections between epistemic fluency, educational research methods and educational design (or educational research as design). The next two papers talk about emerging technology-mediated research methods and implications for educational research. (NB: these two papers have been written in the era when “learning analytics” yet to be invented, but fundamental epistemological questions about big data vs. rich data, digital materiality, digital knowledge, educational research infrastructures, etc. are still pretty “hot”). Of course, others have been writing about these topics too, e.g. see Deb Hayes and Catherine Doherty’s paper on epistemic diversity in the Australian Educational Researcher.

Recently we have been writing some papers on various aspects of the epistemic fluency as well as preparing for several conferences. The following two papers will be presented at EARLI 2017. The first — “Insights into the dynamics between changes in professional fields and teaching in higher education” — will be presented at the symposium “Researching professional learning in changing epistemic environments” (Organised by Monika Nerland); and the second — “Learning as construction of actionable concepts: A multimodal blending perspective” — will be presented at the SIG 17’s (Methods in learning research) invited symposium “The unit of analysis in learning research: Approaches for imagining a transformative research agenda” (Co-organised by Crina Damsa & team). These presentations, when taken together, should give some insights into how (innovative) professional ideas “travel” from changes in professional cultures (and formal documents) to students’ specific ideas of how they should act in practice. At least, they should give some ideas into how such “journeys” of knowledge could be analysed.

If you are coming to EARLI this year, then we will be delighted to meet you there. If not, we will share our presentations in our slideware here after the conference. For now, if you want to read the extended summaries of these papers, please email us and ask. Below are short abstracts. EARLI 2017 program is here.

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This site has been created as a home for resources and discussion on the topic of Epistemic Fluency (Read more).

Epistemic Fluency

"Working on real-world problems usually requires the combination of different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge, as well as different ways of knowing. People who are flexible and adept with respect to different ways of knowing about the world can be said to possess epistemic fluency." (Read more in Chapter 1 of Epistemic fluency book)